Two of the most popular browsers write dozens of daily gigabyteson the SSD of your computer.
The memories SSD They continue to eat up traditional hard drives and virtually anyone who buys a modern computer will choose these drives. storage instead of a mechanical disc.
In addition, its price continues to drop and, despite the fact that at equal capacity they are more expensive, there are already very interesting models on the market, especially considering the increase in performance and speed which provide. However, as with everything, SSDs are not timeless either.
Dozens of gigs written daily on the SSD
We have already spoken on several occasions about the SSD lifespan, the manufacturers have put the batteries so that they last longer and, as a general rule, the official data is very very conservative, withstanding many more cycles than announced.
Now, it does not help to extend that useful life that programs that we use daily write from 10 to 30GB a day, even if you do not use them. That is what they have discovered from STHy it affects browsers as well known as Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
Sergei was testing the SSDLife utility, which is used to analyze and report the useful life of the SSD, as well as to estimate the amount of data read and written to it. I noticed that even with zero browser activity, simply by leaving it open with a couple of tabs, about 10GB is already written to the SSD, every day.
Found the culprit of that continuous write process on SSD: file generation recovery.js of the browser. Face time, the browser generates a file that contains the session data, so, in case of unexpected closure or failure of Windows, the next time you start the browser it gives you the possibility to restore that session.
Adjust the filerecovery.js
Luckily you can adjust the frequency with which this file is created.
To do it in Firefox:
- In the list of advanced settings look for browser.sessionstore.interval
- You see that the value 15000 appears, this means that every 15 seconds a new recovery.js is generated, so we simply have to change that number for a larger one. 300000 equals 5 minutes, for example.
And that’s it, in this way the browser will not generate session recovery files as frequently, but obviously if you increase it a lot, perhaps one day the browser will crash and you will not be able to recover what you have open.
The bad news is that Google Chrome does not allow you to adjust this setting for now, so there is no choice but to keep holding that write load on the SSD. According to STH tests, they can easily be more than 20GB a day, although it depends on the use of the browser, of course.
